


The Best of Starfleet

by BobRussellFan



Category: Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: this is a sad one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:28:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22655506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BobRussellFan/pseuds/BobRussellFan
Summary: In 2267, Christopher Pike has a visitor.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29





	The Best of Starfleet

**Author's Note:**

> It's sad! Leave your comments below.

The Best of Starfleet 

2267 

Starbase 11 

Christopher is alone with his thoughts, and not much else, when she walks into the room. “Captain Pike?” He turns the chair and focuses his eyes - the best he can do, as he looks at the engineering cadet. He recognizes her even through corneas burned by delta rays and says the only thing he can: a single, solitary beep from his chair. When he’s alone, he thinks about how profoundly damaged he is to be so locked in, so far beyond the reach of conventional cybernetics that he might as well be a corpse animated by machines. _I wonder how long Airiam drifted there before the cold killed her. Was she grateful to us? Could she move?_

For now, at least he’s not alone. Sometimes that’s kinder. 

“I wanted to say, sir, that...thank you.” She wipes her face, her voice thick enough that she must have been crying. He wonders which one of his nurses is watching them - the somber-faced Andorian? The talkative Tellarite woman? “They told me, um, that you saved my life. That if I’d been standing there in front of the warp core when it blew, I’d have-been dead before I hit the ground.” Was she about to say “Like you?” He’ll never know. She’s hurt, he can tell; burns across her face and back; and probably enough delta rays that she’ll spend the rest of her career on shore duty.

But that’s all right. 

  
As she thanks him again, Pike takes a moment to remember his last actions as a living man. _No, that’s not right, disability isn’t death -_ ** _I’m not disabled, I’m dying!_** He'd wanted to shout it at Mendoza, the counselors, all the others, scream until his voice was raw - but of course that was too late now. 

The truth was he hadn’t recognized where he was until he was almost too late. Jay Class starships are modular, built by the Federation just after the Romulan War, and with their ‘plug-and-play’ interiors are all over Starfleet. A fleet captain sees many Jay class interiors on inspection tours: the Republic, the Democracy, the Council, and there hadn’t been any ship markings in his vision. He hadn’t known it would be the Congress until the warp core’s shielding started to crack in front of them as a system deliberately left without safeties underwent a real and catastrophic malfunction. 

**_God I hope Colt doesn’t get a courtmartial,_ ** he thinks, emotions twisting down in his belly.  **_She doesn’t deserve that!_ ** Sometimes even the best riders get thrown - and the forces of nature are no respecter of rank and title. It’s the nature of the game. It’s not Captain Mia Colt’s fault that an old ship had an unexpected malfunction, or that a decorated officer had been lost on her watch. 

He forces himself to focus as she kneels down in front of him, taking out a holo that dances like a ghost in front of him. Is that the nurse again? No, it’s a younger shen, with short white hair and skin so dark it's almost midnight blue. “This is...this is my wife Talan, and our son Charlie.” The little Andorian boy must be from one side of the family rather than the other, but his round cerulean cheeks and big white smile are almost human. “I get to go home to them, thanks to you. When I saw them on subspace last night, you were the only one I could think about...”    
  
She starts crying again and Christopher wants to stand up and take her in his arms, and tell her that it’s all right. That what he did for her in those last few seconds may have been the most deliberate actions of his life - actions he’d thought about again and again over the last decade. Watching Una leave for Okinawa to work with Daystrom, a thought on his lips that he was never quite brave enough to vocalize before she beamed down for the last time. Chuffing Spock that he deserved a rank higher than Commander, sighing as he didn’t react. Kirk was an all right kid, though; he’d handle the Enterprise just fine. 

She’s standing up now, wiping her face, and Pike is thinking about that moment when he’d realized he was about to die. He had in ten years thought about resigning and retreating back to Mojave. About turning down the fleet captaincy until they forced him to retire. About becoming a privateer, a free trader; anything but the fate that he knew awaited him. But there’d been one last thing left. 

“Thank you, sir. Thank you for letting me go home to my family.” The cadet stands straight and snaps off a salute. Pike flashes yes, because it’s all he can do; but at least she’s not weeping anymore. He sits there in the chair and it occurs to him suddenly that he has no idea what her name is, and is unlikely to ever find out, and isn't that an irony that Spock would have loved - but then his mind is wandering again like he can't make it _stop_ now that he can't control his body anymore and he’s remembering those last few moments of life. 

Those last few moments of his life when he’d run five steps across a burning engine room and grabbed a headstrong engineering cadet by the collar and _thrown_ her across the room; his back popping from the strain, turning his head to see her hit the deck and be pulled underneath the falling door by her squadmates, away and to safety. 

When he’d turned back to the warp drive and watched it explode in his face - felt the delta rays burn his flesh and deep into his nerves, felt shards of glass tear into his face, felt the shockwave blast him backwards across the room - he hadn’t been afraid. What other man could say that he’d cheated fate, that he’d saved a young woman he’d seen die so she could go home to her wife and daughter instead of becoming another casualty statistic in a service that had seen too many young sentients die? 

He’s weeping now. Dammit. The nurse will be in here soon to check his vitals and dab his face. Dammit. 

He’s weeping because he only cheated fate halfway. 

  
That close to the warp core, he’d expected the blast to kill him. 

  
  



End file.
